Loading modules during startup

[Paul Goyette <paul%whooppee.com@localhost>]

One thing still puzzles me a bit WRT device-driver modules.....

We have a number of devices whose drivers have been modularized.  For 
example, acpicpu(4).  There appears to be no attempt to auto-load 
drivers when their associated devices exist; this could be due, in part, 
to having the xxx_match() within the driver itself.  If there's nothing 
to identify the device, what mechanism should be used to load the 
driver?

My solution has been to manually load the appropriate modules in my 
/etc/rc.local file.  But it would seem to me that there should be a 
"better way" (tm) to do this.

I don't think that a single /etc/rc.d/modules script (with some sort of 
configuration file) would necessarily fill the bill, since there might 
be different dependencies (some modules might need to be loaded early, 
some later).

Any thoughts or suggestions?


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